Cities Compete for Super Bowl Cash
Feb. 2, 2007 — -- Nearly 150 million people worldwide will watch the Chicago Bears battle the Indianapolis Colts this Sunday in Miami for Super Bowl XLI. But for three American cities, the big game has already begun. They're fighting to host the Super Bowl in 2011.
The NFL has already awarded the locations for the next three championships -- Glendale, Ariz., Tampa, Fla., and Miami, again. But 2011's XLV is still up for grabs. The NFL franchises in Dallas, Glendale and Indianapolis are hoping to host the event, and much like the battle between the Colts and the Bears, it's a high-stakes game for the cities involved.
Much like the formal campaigns to host the Olympics every four years, cities involved in Super Bowl bidding invest a lot of time and money to lure the NFL's biggest game. They all guarantee hotel rooms and restaurants, and have been known to promise alterations to city infrastructure and stadiums to fit the NFL's specifications.
"It's pretty cutthroat," said Frank R. Nero, president and CEO of the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, an economic development organization. "Each year the ante gets higher in terms of what [the NFL] wants the municipality to do."
The NFL's Brian McCarthy said each city puts together a package that includes everything the league needs -- including hotel rooms, practice facilities and the location for a media center large enough to contain the 3,500 reporters who descend on the city.
It's a lot of work, but considering the financial windfall a Super Bowl brings, it's not hard to see why cities are willing to do just about anything to get the game. Super Bowls are known to create a multimillion-dollar boon for local businesses and a weeklong publicity blitz for the host city, a prospect that ensures the cities fight hard to get the game.
Fans swarming into Detroit, last year's host city, pushed hotel occupancy to 85 percent, more than doubling the typical occupancy of 40 percent during that time of the year, according to Patrick James Rishe, an economics professor and the director of Sportsimpacts, which conducted an economic impact study for the city.
